High-speed separation of ormeloxifene enantiomers using sulfated ?-cyclodextrin in capillary electrophoresis

Abstract

(−)-Ormeloxifene, a drug candidate under development, was separated from (+)-ormeloxifene using capillary electrophoresis (CE) with sulfated β-cyclodextrin as chiral buffer additive. With conventional long-end injection the method showed high efficiency, since the theoretical plate number for (−)-ormeloxifene was over 1 million per m and the enantiomeric resolution was more than 100. However, the relatively long separation time of ∼22 min was a limiting factor. In order to reduce separation time, short-end injection experiments were carried out. By using the instrumental limits for capillary dimensions and field strength, the separation time was reduced to <40 sec. A further and significant reduction was achieved by applying extended short-end injection, which is a novel injection technique presented in this paper. With the extended short-end injection procedure, a plug of run buffer is injected after the sample has been injected, thus moving the sample closer to the detector and resulting in very short effective capillary lengths. Using the extended short-end injection technique, the separation was performed on 1.8 cm capillary (effective length) and the enantiomers were separated within 10 sec, which is a reduction of the original separation time by a factor of ∼155. Chirality 10:699–704, 1998. © 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.